The SitePoint Forums have moved.

You can now find them here.
This forum is now closed to new posts, but you can browse existing content.
You can find out more information about the move and how to open a new account (if necessary) here.
If you get stuck you can get support by emailing forums@sitepoint.com

If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

CSSZen reusable content - high content sites

Q. What do the CSS Zen practitioners do to repeat menus, headers, footers, and reusable content through out a site?

I think I understand the ideas behind CSS layout and content separation. this works beautifully for a few pages. however I tend to build product sites which may have 20 or more pages. I have been using table based layout with PHP to fill in the content into 1-3 layout templates with nested subtables occaisionally.
Do they design each page fully? Or use a template model with many variations of positional elements to control page placement?

My concern is that I have some pages with 2columns +header/footer/menu or 3 column+h/f/m.

My php.inc included pages are little more than text paragraphs.
The PHP.php template pages controll all layout with Div and span elements.

I'm not quite sure I follow your train of thought but there is no problem with using css on large sites. In fact thats what its good at .

Obviously on a large site (I've just finished one with over a hundred pages which is php driven and uses includes etc for main elements) you develop strategies to cope with the different layouts that are in different sections of the site.

On most sites the navigation and headings and footers are similar (and should be to maintain a conistent look and feel for users) and these would be the main css files that are included on every page.

On pages that have different layouts you would call in a separate css file for that section. It's unlikely that you would have a different layout on every page as it would be a strage site. You just group the sections together and let them use the same css file.

I try to keep all css files under 20k and not just have one massive css file for the whole site as that would be a waste. Therefore you can call in different css files for the different sections (or directories if you wish) and so on.

It just takes a little bit of organising but its quite easy to maintain and usually quite logical